Mass building or building high rises, happen when sufficient
site cannot be found and as a result growing in height would be chosen instead
of building on the ground so that we can remedy the lack of building spaces.
This means, mass building or high rises building is not an obligation just for
the poor. This can also happen for the bourgeois when we are in need of
building spaces. Whit this concept of mass building it is wrong to believe that
bourgeois would only settle in villas or similar living places. We can have the
same facilities and accommodations of a luxurious villa in meters above the
ground. Of course we need to spend a huge amount of money to achieve the same facilities
of a villa in the height. We need to have connections with earth, with green
areas, and high rate of privacy to achieve such convenience that we have in a villa.
For this project we were free to choose between five
different sites in five different regions of the city, Tehran. For choosing the
right site at first we should have found that which concept of mass building we
were facing, the one for the poor or for the bourgeois. According to the given
densities for the building area comparing to the landscape area, it seems that
the answer was mass building for the bourgeois, while we were asked for
designing just twenty percent of the site as residential and the whole
remaining was just for landscape and other facilities. This is completely in
contradictory with the idea of mass building for the poor since ground is
definitely worthy in this idea.
Therefore between the five sites we eliminated the ones in
the downtown, and from the very beginning of designing the project, it was
tried to create aparments with characteristics of a villa and with the same
privacy, facilities and comfort.
We were building in
the height but we were not building apartments. Therefore the concept was
somehow to build villas but not on the ground, but one above each other.
So the modules for
one room houses, two room houses and, three bedroom houses was created
both in one storey houses or two storey houses. Then they were rotated in four
orientations, and finally they were mirrored. As a result we had a variety of
forty-eight different units. There was no problem for rotation or mirroring
while we had enough space in the site to have a kind of density that can
provide light for all the units. The next step was to arrange these units
together and create blocks. We were asked to create four-storey blocks. After
designing the blocks, these blocks were formed in the site in a way that each
group of blocks have created a phase with its own plaza under it and a large
plaza for all the complex parallel to all phases. After the residential and
plaza line we have the landscape area contrasting the first two areas in shape.
And finally under the landscape which was designed in a higher level than
ground level, we have the commercial and sports area. Parking of the complex
was located under the block phases.